Sussex Police are too sexy for US government censors.

They are not the only ones. Other victims include US President George Bush, the US State Department and California governor and Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Sussex Police web site appears on a blacklist of pages the US International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) has banned internet users in China and Iran from seeing.

Access to the site was banned because its address - www.sussex.

police.uk - includes the word "sex".

Other sites blocked for inadvertently including censored words include the link page for the US State Department's overseas missions at www.usembassy.state.gov (because of the "ass") and sites dealing with women's health issues such as www.breastcancer.com because of the word "breast".

Official pages for the US President at www.georgebush.com and www.georgewbush.com are blocked for including the word "bush".

And Governor Schwarzenegger's official site at www.arnold-schwarzenegger.com is outlawed for containing the word "old".

Other banned words include "pic", "hot", "soft", "teen" and "trans".

The service's list of inappropriate keywords also means any web address including "gay" is banned, blocking access to thousands of sites dealing with gay and lesbian issues.

An independent report by the OpenNet Initiative has criticised the US authorities for not applying common sense to its service for people in China and Iran.

The IBB has developed a scheme to allow people in Iran and China to bypass their governments' restrictive blocks on web sites.

But it uses technology from contractor Anonymizer which bars sites suspected of containing porn by monitoring the web addresses.

The OpenNet report states: "Filters built into the IBB Anonymizer service ... have the unintended consequence of blocking access to numerous non-pornographic pages and sites. It is curious to find the US government promoting a tool to circumvent Iranian limits on freedom while imposing crude and, even by its own standards, widely overdrawn limits of its own."

Ken Berman, in charge of the China and Iran projects for the IBB, said: "The porn filtering is a trade-off we feel is a proper balance and that frees up bandwidth for other uses and users."

Lance Cottrell, founder and president of San Diego-based Anonymizer, said it would unblock any non-pornographic sites if asked by Chinese or Iranian web users.